While Sotomayor thus apparently supported terrorism, the ad warns that she also “Wants to Take Away Your Guns.”  Which would, of course, leave you defenseless against those Puerto Rican terrorists.

Palin launched her attack on Obama’s association with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber, before the campaign had finalized a plan to raise the issue. McCain’s advisers were working on a strategy that they hoped to unveil the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and top adviser Mark Salter was resisting.

According to Newsweek, the U.S. Secret Service informed the Obama campaign that the number of threats against the Democratic presidential nominee sharply increased during the time in September and October in which the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies became noticeably angrier. This also coincided with the GOP candidates’ Ayers attacks.

Incidentally, Ayers granted his first interview since becoming a prominent campaign issue yesterday to The Washington Post.

Ayers, an author and education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said he thought the accusation by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that Obama had been “palling around with terrorists” was absurd.

“Pal around together? What does that mean? Share a milkshake with two straws?” Ayers said in his first interview since the controversy began. “I think my relationship with Obama was probably like thousands of others in Chicago. And, like millions and millions of others, I wish I knew him better.”

According to The Post, Ayers and Obama do have one shared experience in recent months — with the increased media attention to their relationship, Ayers, like Obama, received multiple death threats.

In April, The Los Angeles Times published a story that included a description of a videotape of a 2003 party for Khalidi as he was preparing to leave his job at the University of Chicago for his current gig at Columbia University. Obama, then an Illinois state senator, was at the party and gave a moderate speech about bringing opposing sides together, according to the Times.

In an interview this morning with Radio Mambi, a popular Spanish-language radio station in South Florida, McCain apparently seized on a 2005 New York Sun report alleging that former Weatherman and fellow Chicagoan William Ayers was also at the party.  This was not reported in The Times story.

McCain also claimed that Khalidi was a spokesman for Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, a charge Khalidi has denied. McCain joined other conservatives in calling on the Times to release the video.

However, the newspaper says the videotape was shared on the condition that it not be released. To release it would signal to all future potential sources that The Los Angeles Times will give them up at the first sign of pressure.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin happily jumped on the bandwagon today, referring to The Times as the Obama campaign’s “pet newspaper.” (No word yet on how The New York Times is taking this news.)

The whole thing is clearly a distraction. If McCain is really concerned about Khalidi, he should explain why the International Republican Institute, which McCain chaired at the time, gave an organization headed by Khalidi a grant of nearly $500,000 in 1998.

But the convergence of Obama, Ayers and someone with an Arabic name is a perfect bundle for McCain, particularly in South Florida — home to lots and lots of Jews. People weren’t really buying the Ayers-Obama tie, but with Khalidi in the mix, the new implication is: Obama is connected to Ayers, a former domestic terrorist; both are connected to a Muslim who reputedly was connected to the PLO, which was viewed by Israel as a terrorist organization. Ergo, Obama is connected to Islamic terrorism. Throwing a representative of the elite liberal media into the narrative doesn’t hurt either.

However, if McCain really wants people to believe that Obama has connections to terrorism, he should stop pussy-footing around the issue and come out and say it –  so the American people can judge the merits of the claim openly and honestly.

From The New York Times:

After several weeks in which the McCain campaign unleashed a series of strong political attacks on Mr. Obama, trying to tie him to a former 1960s radical, among other things, the poll found that more voters see Mr. McCain as waging a negative campaign than Mr. Obama. Six in 10 voters surveyed said that Mr. McCain had spent more time attacking Mr. Obama than explaining what he would do as president; by about the same number, voters said Mr. Obama was spending more of his time explaining than attacking…

Voters who said their opinions of Mr. Obama had changed recently were twice as likely to say they had grown more favorable as to say they had worsened. And voters who said that their views of Mr. McCain had changed were three times more likely to say that they had worsened than to say they had improved.

The top reasons cited by those who said they thought less of Mr. McCain were his recent attacks and his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate. (The vast majority said their opinions of Mr. Obama of Illinois, the Democratic nominee, and Mr. McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee, had remained unchanged in recent weeks.) But in recent days, Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin have scaled back their attacks on Mr. Obama, although Mr. McCain suggested he might aggressively take on Mr. Obama in Wednesday’s debate.

The poll also found Obama leading McCain nationally by a comfortable 14-percentage point margin, 53 percent to 39 percent. The lead closed to 12-percentage points when third-party candidates were factored in, according to The Times. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Perhaps most shocking was this item, from CBS’ report on the poll:

Among independents who are likely voters – a group that has swung back and forth between McCain and Obama over the course of the campaign – the Democratic ticket now leads by 18 points. McCain led among independents last week.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder reported that a McCain campaign official dismissed the poll, saying it “‘falls outside the range’ of where the race is now.”

Perhaps it does, but it must also be raising the eyebrows of the Republican critics of McCain’s campaign management — like conservative columnist Bill Kristol and McCain’s own brother — if not the managers.

On one hand, the McCain campaign can hardly be blamed for choosing to go negative — it’s how underdogs have often turned around elections for generations. But negativity can have the opposite effect of turning off swing voters — who both campaigns are wooing right now.

This year, the presidential nominees had promised a different type of race: honorable and focused on the issues.

When McCain abandoned that pledge out of political expedience, this poll indicates that he may be paying a far higher price than previous candidates.

It also shows he may face a Catch-22 during tonight’s final presidential debate. His conservative base, whose support McCain really doesn’t have to worry about, would like him talk about William Ayers, the Chicago education leader and former member of the Weatherman Underground — though McCain would likely have to go out of his way to broach the subject, which could look desperate. But if he does, he runs the risk of further alienating the moderates whose votes will decide the election.

This debate may be McCain’s final opportunity to shake up this race. One has to wonder if the McCain campaign is re-formulating its debate strategy right now.

But at the three rallies I’ve attended this week — one a joint appearance of McCain and Palin, the others with McCain solo — no audience member called out “Terrorist,”  “Kill him” or anything close to the vile shout-outs of last week.

What’s the difference?

The most obvious is that neither McCain nor Palin have been talking about former Weatherman William Ayers this week.

The Obama-as-terrorist references have not disappeared entirely from McCain events, though. Yesterday, someone placed a sign featuring Obama’s photo next to Osama bin Laden outside the venue of a McCain event at Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, N.C.

And at the McCain-Palin rally in Virginia Beach earlier in the day, a pair of supporters held up signs that read “Obama Bin Lyin.’”

But we surely have not heard the end of Ayers.

McCain’s advertising is still heavily focused on Obama’s ties to the former radical, and McCain today suggested he may bring up Ayers during the third presidential debate Wednesday.

If he does, McCain could open himself up to more of the negative press he sought to squelch this week.

Yesterday, before the presidential debate in Nashville, she accused Sen. Barack Obama, somewhat hyperbolically, of running “the dirtiest campaign in American history.”

Introducing her husband today at a McCain-Palin campaign rally in Bethlehem, Pa., the normally soft-spoken McCain blasted Obama for failing to support the troops in Iraq.

From Politico:

Amie Parnes reports from a McCain speech in Pennsylvania that Cindy McCain again went after Obama directly today, and accuses him, more or less, of endangering her son’s life.

“The day that Sen. Obama cast a vote to not to fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body, let me tell you,” she said. “I would suggest Sen. Obama change shoes with me for just one day. I suggest he take a day and go watch our men and women deploying.”

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has become Sen. McCain’s vehicle of choice for attacking Obama on his ties to former Weatherman William Ayers.

Now his wife is attacking Obama’s patriotism and campaign tactics.

McCain has done neither. It seems the McCain campaign is using the two women to make claims that the Republican presidential nominee is unwilling to make.

Are McCain’s strategists attempting to capitalize on the fact that the Obama campaign can’t easily hit back at Cindy McCain without looking like jerks?

Again, does McCain’s unwillingness to “go there” himself tell us something about how he views the legitimacy of these attacks?

It turns out that many political figures have tangential links to Ayers, including both major parties’ presidential nominees.  TWI’s Matt DeLong discussed McCain’s tie today, as reported in Time, and now the Democratic National Committee is emailing reporters with an item titled “Ayers Funder Tops List of McCain Endorsements.” The email flags this “key point” from a Huffington Post article:

Second on [McCain's endorsment] list … is Leonore Annenberg, currently the president and chairman of the Annenberg Foundation [and former] the “chief of protocol” at the State Department under President Reagan. If the last name sounds familiar, it’s because it also graces the name of the Chicago education board where Barack Obama and William Ayers sat in the room six times together.

Yes, it’s the politics of six degrees of separation. Kind of a mouthful, but this kind of pushback may help expose the absurdity of attacking senators — who interact with a lot of people — for their passing acquaintanceships.

First, I’d like to say something about the question — from someone named Sherry Lief (I’m unsure of the spelling.) None of my TWI colleagues have heard of her, and Google and Technorati searches yield nothing. I tried every spelling of her name I could think of, and tried searching in combination with Obama and Ayers. If anyone has any insight, I would be interested to learn more about her.

In any case, here is her question:

You had mentioned that Barack Obama has no experience when it comes to a budget. I would like to beg to differ. He was involved with Ayers as a chairman for the Annenberg Project, and apparently, from the research I’ve done, was able to help decide where $450 billion [!] went into spending, for educational projects. Every time math and science came up, he threw it out the window, and spent the money on educational programs that were socialistic in their genre. My research shows he failed. Isn’t that a huge point to be able to bring up?

That’s quite a question — by far the most partisan I’ve ever heard on any of the dozens of these conference calls I’ve sat in on. This is also noteworthy because Giuliani took only three questions, and another was similarly partisan — from a conservative blogger named Chuck Pardee, who asked a question critical of TV comedians who have mocked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s and “make a living embellishing facts.” The other question was not partisan, but came from the conservative Website Townhall.com’s Matt Lewis.

Usually, on these calls, the questioners are a mix of mainstream journalists, asking straight questions. That all three questions came from conservatives — and two were of a decidedly partisan nature — struck me as strange. Perhaps it was a coincidence. I certainly don’t have enough information to accuse the campaign of planting questions or cherry-picking questioners.

But this definitely did not “smell right,” as David Letterman would say.

Anyway, on to Giuliani’s comments:

That’s very interesting. That is an area of Sen. Obama’s background that seems to be very much hidden, and the media doesn’t seem to be spending very much time on it, and I really would like to know more about it. I don’t want to come to any conclusions about it until I know more about it. But, he was involved with [the Assn. of Community Organizers for Reform Now]. When he was a community organizer, I believe, it was a group, including ACORN, that recruited him. He did give out a lot of money, and I know Ayers was on the same board he was on. I also know, from the [unintelligible] that I’ve done, that a lot of the projects failed miserably.

This is an area that could be examined. You do know that he is often attacked for having never run a budget. He never mentions this as a budget that he ran — which is a telltale sign to me that he isn’t very proud of how he managed this budget. Unfortunately, I don’t have the details at my fingertips, but I’ll get them now that you’ve mentioned it, about how exactly he managed that budget, how large it was, what responsibility he had. I’ve just kind of exhausted my knowledge of it with what I’ve told you.

I have, in the past, said that I find his involvement with Ayers to be very troubling. Maybe this is, in part, my background as a U.S. attorney who had to deal with some of the aftermath of the Weather Underground, and as someone who has five uncles who are police officers. I find the involvement with a man who blew up public buildings, and still remains proud of it, I find that to be very troubling. And I don’t find that to be an unfair area to examine, if all we’ve got to go on with Barack Obama is his judgment.

Look, being honest, he doesn’t have the experience – and if you say he has experience, he doesn’t have much. But if he doesn’t have experience, what does he have? Judgment. Then we’ve got to examine his judgment, and being on a board with Ayers, who is a, still, proud member of the Weather Underground, having done the first fund-raiser for him, when he ran for public office — along with, I believe, Ayers wife, Bernadette Dohrn, who was another member of the Weather Underground.

These are troubling facts that have to be examined — if Barack Obama is running on judgment — and it’s not unfair to examine them. Considering what they’re examining Sarah Palin on, how does it become unfair to be digging in and trying to find out how close was his involvement with Ayers? How successful was their program together? If they gave money to housing, did the housing work? Did they give it to legitimate housing projects, or did they reward friends? Was it Chicago-style projects, or was it more independent-style politics. All of these are very fair questions. So I will look into some of them. Thank you, and thank you for alerting me to it.

For someone who said he didn’t know much about Ayers and Obama, he sure had a lot to say on the subject off the top of his head.

One point of fact-checking: Giuliani repeated the false claim that Ayers hosted Obama’s “first fund-raiser.” Ayers did host an early event at his home when Obama first announced his plans to run for the Illinois state senate. However, it was not a fund-raiser, and Politico’s Ben Smith reports that Ayers did not contribute financially to “Obama’s first campaign, according to Illinois state records.”

It is also worth noting that the last time Ayers came up was also on a McCain campaign conference call. A McCain campaign adviser made the claims about Obama and Ayers on the aforementioned call that Smith fact-checked last week. When the campaign raised the issue directly, along with a slew of other claims, it didn’t have the desired impact.

Considering the urgency created by McCain’s recent slide in the polls — and the short time left until November — the fact that it came up this time in such an unusual way seems suspicious.

UPDATE: Others who sat in the call report the mystery questioner’s name as Sherry Riggs. Maybe I need a better recorder. Nonetheless, I still can’t find anything about her.